[Free Press] I have been thinking a great deal about Russia these past few days in light of Thursday’s dramatic prisoner swap, which culminated with Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich emerging from an airplane at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, D.C. More to the point, I’ve been thinking about those courageous Russian souls who, like Gershkovich, escaped from the authoritarian darkness and found their way to America.
At the top of that list is Alexander Solzhenitsyn—the author of one of the few books that actually changed the world. The Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume nonfiction account of life inside the notorious Stalinist penal system, first appeared in French in 1973, and the next year in English.
It created an audible and devastating crack in the Iron Curtain.
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Before Solzhenitsyn, there were plenty of writers from inside and outside the Soviet Union who had tried to bring to light the horrors of the Soviet system. But few works had the comprehensive, irrefutable power of Solzhenitsyn’s.
Not only does The Gulag Archipelago include mounds of research, detail, and firsthand experience—which, together, provide for an amazingly powerful window into the totalitarian perplex—Solzhenitsyn also delves into any number of painful philosophical questions: Why didn’t the people rise up against the secret police? How did the system of terror embed itself so completely? Why did people allow their neighbors to be arrested—disappeared—in the middle of the night while waiting, cowering, knowing that they would be next?
If Americans thought that Solzhenitsyn would not turn his penetrating gaze on them after he arrived in America, they were sorely mistaken.
He had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for writing books that were dangerously honest—and, worse yet, widely read—and in 1975, he moved with his family to the little Vermont town of Cavendish.
On June 8, 1978, the writer gave the commencement address at Harvard University, and he was as controversial as ever.
One might have expected Solzhenitsyn to lavish the Americans with praise, to talk about the splendor of America, the generosity of spirit, the freedom, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all that. And one might have expected Solzhenitsyn to contrast this idealized America with his homeland—to turn his penetrating gaze, once again, on the Soviet Union.
But he had done that. Everyone knew where he stood on the USSR.
Instead, to the great discomfort of many in the audience at Harvard, he focused on the West—and, in particular, on the United States.
The speech was titled "A World Split Apart," and, to say the least, it did not meet with universal praise. Many of the Americans who heard it thought Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of contemporary America inadequate, off-kilter—ungrateful. But what was he to do? He was in the business of telling the truth and nothing else.
Some of his criticisms of life in the West came from a distinctly Russian place—for example, the absence of deep faith. "The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer," he said.
Yet a number of the barbs he fired off, viewed through the lens of the present, sound remarkably prescient—among others, his warning about the fad that would turn into post-colonial studies.
"Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account," he said.
As we now know, for the protesters who have marred American campuses these past several months, nothing will be enough to settle the account.
He was coruscating when it came to the "legalism" that had eclipsed the old culture of virtue in Western society. And he was equally coruscating when railing against what we would now call groupthink.
"Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges," he said.
How embarrassing to have been an American—a soon-to-be graduate of the nation’s most prestigious university, or, better yet, an esteemed professor or dean at that university—and to be forced to listen to a Soviet exile, a man who could not even speak to his audience in English, lecture them about their many shortcomings. (Those criticisms probably wouldn’t have stung had they not been so true.)
Perhaps most memorable was what Solzhenitsyn said about the West’s "decline in courage." It was a moment worthy of Pericles. (You may recall my recent column on the great Athenian general.)
In his speech, Solzhenitsyn implored his audience to reclaim their strength, their courage, to recall that they were here not to live comfortably—not to succumb to "the cult of material well-being."
"Western thinking has become conservative," he declared. "The world situation must stay as it is at any cost; there must be no changes."
He added: "This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has ceased to develop."
Not just that: he challenged his audience to live lives of deeper meaning. To wrestle with greater challenges—spiritual, existential challenges that force us to confront ourselves. To rise above our mere existence. To transcend our material, physical, geographical confines.
By the time he wrapped up his hour-long speech, Solzhenitsyn’s lamentation of all that ailed the West had become an exhortation—a calling to higher things
And it was this calling, this demand that we do something with our freedom, that I couldn’t help but think of while watching Evan Gershkovich shaking the hand of the president and vice president of the United States, and hugging his mother, and happily, smilingly, looking toward a future far away from his Russian prison cell. His story, after all, is inspiring—meaningful. It reminds us of what true strength and resilience look like. It reminds us that we are remarkably fortunate and that we must do something with that good fortune.
The world, Solzhenitsyn said, "will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era."
Then, he ended his speech with this poignant line: "This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward."
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